If you live anywhere near Portland, Bend, Eugene, and many other parts of Oregon, you are probably aware of the Craft Beer scene; either as an active participant or occasional goer. You may also be familiar with the Beer Guide the Willamette Week comes out with each year outlining all breweries within 100 miles of Portland. If you are one to either purchase this guide in softbound form or just browse online, you will find one called “The Smallest Fully Licensed Brewpub Anywhere Near Portland” and, yes, that would be us.

Now, we did not choose that name. Nor did we provide or even hint to that name. Were we surprised to be dubbed that name? No. But honestly, if Willamette Week did the research to come up with that, I think it’s a pretty cool achievement.

However, there are some clarifications about the write-up that are needed; either due to the taster/journalists note-taking skills, loss in translation to the editor, or the editor choosing to change text. Whatever the case, here are some things that need correcting:

We are not appointment only. We have set hours, M, W, F (6-9 p.m.) and Sat (2-9 p.m.).

We are not selling kegs to Uptown Market at this time (even though we know them well and have had our beer on tap with a collaboration in the past), our distribution of kegs is just within Forest Grove right now to Waltz brewing and other establishments.

We do offer tastings and growler fills directly in our brew pub as well, which was left out.

Yes, we are only making “basic” ales right now. Sorry, no barrel-aged, no sours, no whatever the latest food-turned-beer is, no pablano/habanero chili blast porter with a touch of lime … sorry, not sorry. Our ales follow a lot of the BJCP guidelines in design, as well as looking historically at the tradition of the style itself. But, sure, they can call them “basic.”

All in all though it was a good experience. It is humbling to see our little nano-brewery grow and get more exposure. As they mentioned we wrote a zero-debt model, scaling year after year with what we bring in. We already doubled our output from last August when we were finally licensed by the TTB (federal government) to start selling our beer, so the model is working. Markets and events are a large part of our business plan and we missed most of that season last year so it will be interesting to see how it plays out this year.

Anywhoooooo … A big thank you to all our followers for your support and encouragement. Oh and of course if you do pick up a copy of the Willamette Week, bring it in and we’ll be happy to autograph it 🙂